William Crolly: Archbishop of Armagh, 1835-49 by Ambrose Macaulay (review)

264 BOOK REVIEWS favor of creeds, or to seek out true explanations for the roots of conversion, or to praise the life of the countryside against the tainted ways of the city, or to prove that faith in God does not depend on believing in miracles. One of the commonest is the assertion of the divine rights of the Church against the State. The catacombs appear but not largely. The Fathers appear but they are select— Cyprian especially,Augustine next, the Alexandrians not at all. One or two show the new state of knowledge, as after the publication of Lightfoot's Apostolic Fathers . Our author has not exhausted this field ofwriting which is unfathomable. But he is an original guide into its importance. Owen Chadwick Cambridge University William Crolly: Archbishop of Armagh, 1835-49. By Ambrose Macaulay. (Blackrock, Co. Dublin, Ireland: Four Courts Press. 1994. Pp. xiii, 481. $45.00.) A controversy among Irish prelates in 1995 over the propriety of even discussing change in the requirement of clerical celibacy led several commentators to remark that not since the 1840's had members of the hierarchy so assailed one another's views in the public media. In that period William Crolly and his colleague Daniel Murray,Archbishop of Dublin, were trying to lead the hierarchy to take advantage of the government's disposition to make concessions to Irish Catholicism. They were opposed, often publicly and intemperately , by Archbishop John MacHale of Tuam, who suspected almost any government concession to be a poisoned cup. With the assistance of Paul Cullen, Rector ofthe Irish College in Rome, MacHale's party eventually won the favor of the Holy See and control of the hierarchy, which was then led for a generation by Cullen as Archbishop first ofArmagh and then of Dublin (and soon as the new adversary of the impossible Archbishop ofTuam). Macaulay has produced a much-needed and well-researched biography of Crolly. He makes a very sensible case for the archbishop's rationality, sensitivity, and devotion to Catholic interests throughout this unseemly controversy, though the force of this case is occasionally diminished by unnecessarily detailed recounting ofthe archival record. Actually, Crolly's failure as leader of the hierarchy was not the first but the second political tragedy of his career. Prior to his primacy he had spent twentythree years in Belfast,first as parish priest and then as Bishop of Down and Connor . In those roles he worked tirelessly to advance Catholic interests by building relationships with the Presbyterians who dominated the city, only to see the very liberals whose good will he had cultivated so assiduously marginalized within Irish Presbyterianism in the subscription crisis of 1829. In dealing with this phase of Crolly's career, Macaulay does something which is quite rare in Irish church history: he writes some passages which are genuinely ecumeni- BOOK REVIEWS 265 cal. The effort is not flawless—for example,John Edgar (p. 102) was a Seceder, not a Remonstrant—but it is to be applauded nevertheless. It raises the question , however, whether any of us who write Irish church history can really empathize with figures on the "other side" of the Irish sectarian divide. Ironically, the Presbyterian figures which Catholics found most appealing were the Arians . The orthodox Presbyterians, who would have agreed with Crolly and even MacHale on more points of Christian doctrine, seemed far more alien to contemporary Catholics because of political differences, and Macaulay does not manage much more empathy than they did. It seems to me that the key to achieving such empathy is to take more seriously the social context of pre-Famine Irish religion—in particular the existence of a huge agrarian underclass, many of whom were far less observant of their canonical obligations than were Irish Catholics a century later. Macaulay grapples with the principal source on which this generalization is based, the 1834 religious census, but he does so more as a pastor than as an historian: he is more concerned with whether folk had a valid excuse for failing to attend Mass than with the causes or meaning of that failure. The matter is important for Catholic-Presbyterian relations, because this is just the moment...